This Week's Installment
This also happens to bring me to the end of chapter two.
The old gentleman is already a bit jealous sometimes when she pays attention to me too carefully at table and regularly makes my favorite foods for me. Regrets, as you see, I don't have yet and never will. But what I wanted to ask," he turned himself to Hans again now, "what did Stoltzmann think then?"
"He was very reserved and noticed only that a very large number of the applicants for the spot would have reported, and he got involved in nothing else."
"Didn't you mention Edith, Miss von Barrnhoff? Didn't you pay his wife a visit? She is Edith's best friend and would surely listen to her!"
"Nothing from all of that."
---25---
"But why not, man?"
"Because I don't want to owe my election to such means and recommendations. If everything that I accomplished thus far doesn't speak for me, then I just have to do without."
"Do you hear it, Edith? He's always been so! So are all we Warsows - always with our own strength, always with our hard heads! For heaven's sake, no associations and no recommendations! That's also why we've never gotten far. But you will have done it already, haven't you, Edith? So drop it, Hans, she doesn't do it for you or for me. She does a good deed for the city Rodenburg. They should look for that kind of priest! You can recommend him with pure conscience; you can believe me about that!"
"Gladly, I want to try what is in my powers, provided - naturally - that your brother approves of it."
"Then you do it without his will, yes, against his will! For my sake, Edith, do it!"
The old Reckstein citizen stept into the room. The long ride had made him fresh and springy; his blood and his movements had something of a young military man. But in the faint light of the spirit lamp, which one always burnt in Reckenstein and which was just now lit, his face showed tired features.
He had not many men to whom he gave his affection; he was critical and inclined to objection. However even today he welcomed Fritz with heartfelt joy, while in contrast he adopted a cooler manner for his brother, without, however, neglecting through word or expression the duties of the host. Because hospitality was a sacred thing in Reckenstein. Under trivial
---26---
conversations the richly served dinner proceeded; then the two brothers went through the starry summer night to Bärwalde.
Interesting Word I Happened Upon
- das Bauchknöpfchen - belly button [aside from the -chen ending, which - if I remember aright - makes this a diminutive, this is the same as the English (Bauch is belly, and Knopf is button), but I think I prefer this is a word]
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
I can't find a translation of "Bereut," but I did find bereuen (to regret), so I'm pretty sure "Bereut" is a noun form. I don't know if it's singular or plural though. Later in the sentence ("Bereut, wie du siehst, habe ich noch nicht und werde es nie tun"), there's a singular pronoun ("es"), but I don't think that refers to "Bereut." I think it's more like, "Regrets, as you see, I don't have yet and will never do it [have regrets]."I'm sure this won't be the last time this happens, but in translating one sentence, I realized I made an error in a previous sentence. At least it was only a couple lines ago, rather than a few pages. The second half of a sentence was "mit ihr läßt sich doch reden." In order to translate this, I had to look up "reden." I knew that usually it means just "speak" or "talk," but with "läßt" and the reflexive "sich," I figured that this probably has a more involved meaning. My dictionary gave me the phrase "sie läßt nicht mit sich reden" - "she won't listen (to anyone)." Aside from the negative, I think this is the same sense as in my text, which I translated as "would surely listen to her."
It was at this point that I realized I'd lost the narrative thread. Since I'm translating this sentence by sentence, I often find myself neglecting the larger picture. As far as I can tell, Fritz is nervous about getting a position he wants, and his getting it is dependent on Stoltzmann. Fritz's brother Hans reminds him that Stoltzmann's wife is friends with Edith, and he implies that Edith can help Fritz's cause by speaking to Stoltzmann's wife about it.
Stoltzmann's apparent opposition (or maybe just indifference) recalled my attention to a sentence I translated three days ago (the 18th). I'd thought it was "He [Stolzmann] was very reserved and noticed only that a very large number of the applicants for the spot would have reported and gotten involved in nothing else." I'd thought "would have reported" and "[would have] gotten involved" had the same subject ("a very large number"). Looking at it again though, I realized that subject of "ließ sich auf nichts andres ein" is "Er" (Stoltzmann). So it's "He was very reserved and noticed only that a very large number of the applicants for the spot would have reported, and he got involved in nothing else." This explains the indifference that Fritz wants to overcome so that he can secure the position he wants.
I couldn't find the word "alledem" by itself, but I did find it in the phrase "trotz alledem," which means "in spite of all that" or "in spite of it all." Because "trotz" means "despite" or "in spite of," it seems that "alledem" means "all of that." So I translated "Nichts von alledem" as "Nothing from all of that."
In an earlier post, I mentioned that sometimes the German present tense is translated as English future tense when some other sentence elements (like adverbs) imply a future time. I think I ran into a sort-of-similar instance of that, but instead of simple future tense (will do), it's future perfect tense (will have done). The sentence has "du wirst die Sache schon machen." Literally, it's something like "You will do the job already," but without the imperative tone that "You will do the job already" has in English. There's a grammatical strain between "wirst" ("will") and "schon" ("already"). Individually, "wirst" indicates simple future tense, and "schon" indicates a past tense. Having both creates a temporal conflict, and the only solution I can think of is an implied future perfect tense, so I translated that sentence as "you will have already done the job."
I translated "das darfst du mir glauben" as "you can believe me about that" rather than the literal "that you may believe from me." It's smoother that way.
In one of these sentences, I changed a noun to the plural to make a more sensible translation. "Sein Gesicht zeigte... einen müden Zug" is literally "His face showed... a tired feature." Since that sounds weird, I altered it to "His face showed tired features."
In my dictionary, I couldn't find a translation of Aussetzen as a noun. In the sentence, it's the object of the verb neigen ("zum Aussetzen geneigt"), which I translated as incline (although since it's geneigt, the translation is inclined). One of the translations given for aussetzen is to object to, so I started wondering if I could translate Aussetzen as objection (so, zum Aussetzen geneigt would mean inclined to objection). Using a trick I learned in German class, I lookt up objection in the English section, and I found die Abneigung. It's related to the verb in my sentence, so I'm pretty confident that zum Aussetzen geneigt does indeed mean inclined to objection.
My dictionary tells me that der Hauswirt means landlord, but landlord doesn't make sense in the context of the sentence in which Hauswirt appears. I lookt up just der Wirt and found that it means host, and host does fit the context.
That same sentence has what I'm pretty sure is a participial, but neither of my German textbooks has anything about participials, and when I lookt them up on the internet, Google asked me, "Do you mean participles?" No, Google, I did not. The original text reads, "ohne jedoch durch Wort oder Miene die Pflichten des Hauswirts zu vernachlässigen." Translating "vernachlässigen" as a participle (a participle that is part of a participial, not one that modifies a noun, which is the only kind my textbooks talk about) is the only way I can make sense of this. I translated it as "without, however, neglecting through word or expression the duties of the host."
